Big Love: The emotional lives of elephants

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Big
Love
The emotional lives of elephants
Carl Safina
photogr aphs by
Wol f A demei t
A
lison, fifty-one years old, is right — there, in that clump of
palms — see? And there is Agatha, forty-four years old. And this
one coming closer now is Amelia, also forty-four. Amelia continues
approaching until, rather alarmingly, she is looming so hugely in front of our
vehicle that I reflexively lean inward. Cynthia Moss leans out and talks to her
in soothing tones.
Cynthia arrived in Kenya forty years ago, determined to learn the lives
of elephants. The first elephant family she saw, she named the “AA” family,
and she named one of those elephants Alison. And there she is. Right there,
vacuuming up fallen palm fruits. Astonishing.
With much luck and decent rainfall, Alison might survive another decade.
Amelia, practically alongside now, simply towers as she grinds palm
fronds, rumbles softly, and blinks.
In the light of this egg-yolk dawn, the landscape seems an eternal ocean
of grass rolling toward the base of Africa’s greatest mountain, whose blue
head is crowned by snow and wreathed in clouds. Through gravity-fed
springs, Kilimanjaro acts like a giant water cooler, creating two miles-long
marshes that make this place magnetic for wildlife and for pastoralist herders. Amboseli National Park got its name from a Maa word that refers to
the ancient shallow lakebed — half the park — that seasonally glitters with
the sparkle of wetness. The marshes expand and contract depending on the
rains. But if the rains fail, panes of water dry to pans of dust. And then all bets
are o=. Just four years ago, a drought of extremes shook this place to its core.
Through times lush and calamitous, through these decades, Cynthia and
these three elephants have maintained their presence, urging themselves
across this landscape. Cynthia helped pioneer the deceptively complex task
of simply seeing elephants doing elephant things. Longer than any other
human being ever has, Cynthia has watched some of the same individual
elephants living their lives.
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Several happy elephants are sloshing through an emerald
spring under ample palm shade. It’s a little patch of paradise.
With bouncy, rubbery little trunks, the babies seem to transit the
outer orbits of innocence.
“Look how fat that baby is,” I say. The fifteen-month-old looks
like a ball of butter. Four adults and three little babies are wallowing in one muddy pool, spraying water over their backs with
their trunks, then sprawling on the bank. As a little one melts in
pleasure, I notice the muscles around the trunk relaxing, eyes
half-closing. An adolescent named Alfre lies down to rest. But
three youngsters pile on, stepping on Alfre’s ear. Oomph. The
fun softens to a snooze, with babies lying asleep on their sides,
adults standing protectively over them, the adults’ bodies touching one another’s as they doze. Feel how calm they are, knowing
their family is safe here now. It’s soothing just to watch.
Many people fantasize that if they won the lottery, they would
quit their job and immerse themselves in leisure, play, family, parenthood, occasional thrilling sex; they’d eat when they were hungry
and sleep whenever they felt sleepy. Many people, if they won the
lottery and got rich quick, would want to live like elephants.
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The elephants certainly seem happy. But when an elephant
seems happy to us, do they really feel happy? My inner scientist
wants proof.
“Elephants experience joy,” Cynthia says. “It may not be human
joy. But it is joy.”
“You have to know everyone. Yes!” Katito Sayialel is saying,
her lilting accent as clear and light as this African morning. A
native Maasai, tall and capable, Katito has been studying freeliving elephants with Cynthia Moss for more than two decades.
How many is “everyone”?
“I can recognize all the adult females. So,” Katito considers,
“nine hundred to one thousand. Say nine hundred. Yes.”
Recognizing hundreds and hundreds of elephants on sight?
How is this possible? Some she knows by marks: the position
of a hole in an ear, for instance. But many, she just glances at.
They’re that familiar, like your friends are.
When you’re studying social relationships as they’re all mingling, you can’t a=ord to say, “Wait a minute; who was that?”
You have to know them. Knowing hundreds of individuals is
necessary because elephants themselves recognize hundreds
of individuals. They live in vast social networks of families and
friendships and other relationships. That’s why they’re famous
for their memory. They certainly recognize Katito.
“When I first arrived here,” Katito recalls, “they heard my
voice and knew I was a new person. They came to smell me.
Now they know me.”
Vicki Fishlock is here, too. A blue-eyed Brit in her early thirties,
Vicki studied gorillas and elephants in the Republic of the Congo
before bringing her doctoral diploma here to work with Cynthia.
She’s been here for a couple of years and has no plans to go anywhere else if she can help it. Usually Katito takes attendance and
rolls on. Vicki stays and watches behavior. Today we’re out on a bit
of a jaunt, as they’re kindly showing me around.
We come upon some grazing elephants trailing a train of
egrets and an orbiting galaxy of swirling swallows. The birds rely
on elephants to stir up insects as, like great gray ships, they plow
through the grassy sea. Light shifts on their wide, rolling backs
like sun on ocean waves. Sounds of ripping, chewing. Flap of ear.
Plop of dung. The buzz of flies and swoosh of swatting tails. Soft
tom-tom footfalls. And, mostly, the quiet ways of ample beasts.
Wordlessly they speak of a time before human breath. They get
on with their lives, ignoring us.
“They’re not ignoring us,” Vicki corrects. “They have an expectation of politeness, and we’re fulfilling it. So they’re not
paying us any mind.” Through hummocks and the bush, in our
vehicle we amble with them.
“Here’s someone feeling a little silly,” Vicki says, pointing.
“See her with that loose walk and her trunk swaying?”
I do.
“One day when I was new here,” Vicki recalls, “Norah and I
were watching and suddenly everyone started running around
and trumpeting. I was like, ‘What the hell just happened?’ Norah
said, ‘Oh they’re just being silly.’
“I thought, ‘Silly?’ And the next thing I know, a full-grown female comes along walking on her knees and throwing her head
around, acting just da=y. They were just happy. They were like,
‘Yaaay!’ Everyone says how smart they are. But they can be ridiculous, too. If a young male doesn’t have a friend around, sometimes
he’ll make a little mock charge at us, then back up or twirl around.
I actually had one male kneel down right in front of the car and
throw zebra bones at me, trying to get me to play with him.”
When the science of animal behavior was getting established,
there was no scientific way to approach the prospect of animal
emotions or to pose a question such as “What does an elephant feel
when she nurses her baby?” There was nothing to go on. No one
had watched free-living animals living their real lives. Brain science
was in its infancy. So speculation about their feelings could only
draw on our own feelings — leading ourselves in circles. The new
scientists insisted on observation, not speculation. Speculation was
messy guessing that one had to avoid. We can observe what an elephant does. There’s no way to know how the animal feels. So just
count how many minutes she nurses her o=spring. As even the
noted elephant communication expert Joyce Poole has explained,
“I was trained to view non-human animals as behaving in ways
that don’t necessarily involve any conscious thinking.”
My own initiation into formal training included the classic directive to steer strictly clear of anything smacking of attributing human
mental experiences — values, thoughts, or emotions — to other
animals. (Doing so is called “anthropomorphism.”) I appreciate
that. We shouldn’t assume that animals (or, for that matter, lovers,
spouses, kids, or parents) “must be” thinking and feeling just as
we would if we were them. They’re not us. By not assuming, we
open a clearer path to understanding what’s really going on.
But it wasn’t that the question of animal thoughts and emotions
awaited better data; it was that the whole subject became verboten.
Wondering what feelings or thoughts might motivate behavioral
acts became totally taboo. Radio blackout. Professional behaviorists could describe what they saw, period. Description — and only
­description — became “the” science of animal behavior. You could
say that a lion was stalking a zebra. If you said the lion wanted to
catch it, you’d be accused of “projecting your human emotions.”
After all, the lion might be an utterly unconscious machine — you
can’t know. You could say, “The elephant positioned herself between her calf and the hyena.” The mother wouldn’t position herself between her baby and an antelope. She knows hyenas are a
threat. But if you said, “The mother positioned herself to protect
her baby from the hyena,” that was out of bounds; it was anthropomorphic. We can’t know the mother’s intent. And this was stifling.
In establishing the study of behavior as a science, it had originally been helpful to make anthropomorphism a word that raised a
red flag. But as lesser intellects followed the Nobel Prize–winning
pioneers, anthropomorphism became a pirate flag. If the word was
hoisted, an attack was imminent. You wouldn’t get your work published. And in the academic realm of publish or perish, jobs were
at stake. Even the most informed, insightful, logical inferences
about other animals’ motivations, emotions, and awareness could
wreck your professional prospects.
But what is a “human” emotion? When someone says you can’t
attribute human emotions to animals, they forget the key leveling
detail: humans are animals. Human sensations are animal sensations. Inherited sensations, using inherited nervous systems.
All of the emotions we know of just happen to be emotions that
humans feel. So, simply deciding that other animals can’t have
any emotions that humans feel is a cheap way to get a monopoly
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on all the world’s feelings and motivation. People who’ve systematically watched or known animals realize the absurdity of this.
But many others still don’t. “The dilemma remains,” wrote author Caitrin Nicol recently, “how to get an accurate understanding
of the animals’ nature and (if appropriate) emotions, without imposing on them assumptions born of a distinctly human under­
standing of the world.”
But tell me, what “distinctly human understanding” hampers
our understanding of other animals’ emotions? Is it our sense of
pleasure, pain, sexuality, hunger, frustration, self-preservation,
defense, parental protection? We never seem to doubt that an
animal acting hungry feels hungry. What reason is there to disbelieve that an elephant who seems happy is happy? We can’t
really claim scientific objectivity when we recognize hunger and
thirst while animals are eating and drinking, exhaustion when
they tire, but deny them joy and happiness as they’re playing
with their children and their families. Yet the science of animal
behavior has long operated with that bias — and that’s unscientific. In science, the simplest interpretation of evidence is often
the best. When animals seem joyous in joyful contexts, joy is the
simplest interpretation of the evidence. Their brains are similar
to ours, they make the same hormones involved in human
­emotions — and that’s evidence too.
The ability — and the need — to form deep social bonds developed through deep time. It didn’t just suddenly appear with
the emergence of modern humans. Parental care, satisfaction,
friendship, compassion, grief — all began their journey in prehuman beings. Our brain’s provenance is inseparable from
other species’ brains in the long cauldron of living time. And
thus, so is our mind. Our mind arrived with other species’ minds
in one long gesture in the continuous sweep of Life.
Up ahead, two groups are converging, each part of the family
called the FBs. All mothers are keeping in physical contact with
their babies by touching them with their tails. Right now Felicity
is with her daughters and two unrelated females — Flame and
Flossie, who are sisters. Fanny is leading her young ones, her niece
Feretia and her great-niece Felica. Vicki tells me that Fanny is very
level but not hugely a=ectionate with her young ones. By contrast,
Felicity and her o=spring are always touching one another.
Felicity knows that this area they’ve just covered is safe. Her
family feels secure at the moment because Felicity’s got their back.
Often a matriarch will lead from the rear of the group. But when
she stops, everyone stops. They’re listening to her even when
she’s behind them. They know right where she is. When something scary happens up ahead, the family will rush back to Felicity.
If there’s something dangerous, like a lion or bu=alo, she may
choose to retreat or have the family charge and drive them o=.
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“That decision is up to her,” Vicki tells me. Right now, Vicki
observes, “Everyone feels safe and secure, everyone’s relaxed;
kids are playing. Nobody’s worried about anything.
“So, Felicity’s an unusually good matriarch. If you have a matriarch who’s a suspicious, high-stress type, everybody’s always
being vigilant, always listening for danger. Elephants like that
continually have elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol in
their blood; that is not good for metabolism.”
Vicki says to the elephants, “So it pays to be chilled out,
doesn’t it, guys?”
Everyone assents by calmly doing what they’ve been doing.
Felicity’s baby is about fifty yards away from her mother, up
here near us with the rest of the family. She’s a particularly confident little elephant. Her big sister is right next to her. Suddenly,
she runs back to her mother.
“It’s a bit of a game,” Vicki interprets. “Like, ‘Look, I’m over
here, and I’m okay!’” She’s having fun, ears out, waving her little
trunk around, charging an egret. It looks like the kind of charge
an adult might use to scare o= a lion. Part of the family’s role is
allowing youngsters to explore and learn through their own experiences. Male youngsters tend to play pushing contests against
each other. Females tend to play, “I’m chasing enemies.” Felicity’s baby charges a couple more egrets. “But you also have to
teach them to respond to danger.”
Even full-sized adults sometimes play games against imaginary enemies. They might start running through tall grass,
thrashing it, the kind of behavior they might actually use to
chase away lions. “But the elephants are playing,” declares Vicki.
“They know there are no lions.”
But — if elephants act like there are lions and there are no
­lions, isn’t it possible they’re just making a mistake or being
­extra careful?
“It’s easy to tell,” Vicki explains. A serious elephant faced with
a real threat pays steady attention. Playing elephants run in a loose
and “floppy” way, shaking their heads to let their ears and trunk
flap and flop around. “They are not making mistakes or giving
false alarms. They’re running around as if highly alarmed but doing what we call ‘play-trumpeting.’ They all know they’re playing.”
When doing serious things in nonserious moments — ­staring
over their tusks at imagined enemies in the wide-eyed display or
shaking their heads before charging and running away in mock
fright — playing elephants often seem to be going just for the
humor value. And they’re all in on the game. Such blatant silliness must be — I am guessing — as close to hilarious as an elephant perceives; the elephants must be cracking themselves up.
Clearly, they’re having fun. “Sometimes they put bushes on their
heads and just look at you like that,” Vicki says. “Ridiculous.”
Fanny’s little one flares her ears at us, sizing us up, deciding
whether we’re now the enemy. She pulls herself up to full height
and kind of looks down her nose at us. “We call that posture
‘stand-tall,’” Vicki explains. The little one seems to decide we’re
either okay or too big to mess with. In a few moments she’s under her sister’s chin, deciding whether to charge a grouselike
bird called a yellow-necked francolin.
The scene is so moving, so filled with beautiful innocence.
But their lives are not always this perfect. No lives are.
Flanna’s ear has a big triangle missing, where a spear went
through it. One of these elephants lacks a tail. Hyenas sometimes bite o= an elephant’s tail while she is giving birth. Hyenas
will also seize a baby if they can. Lions can kill smaller elephants.
The joys and the dangers are both very real, and these babies,
running around just having fun, are as naïve as they are vulnerable. They have to be taught to fear lions.
Felicity has been leading from the rear but has slowed and
dropped even farther behind, as if something is up. Suddenly
she wheels, and a hyena peeks out from behind a bush. Felicity
stares. Its cover blown, the hyena saunters o=.
“So, see — ” says Vicki rather proudly. “Felicity is such a good
matriarch.”
The sun is levitating. The equatorial heat begins hurrying the elephants toward the quenching wetland. Mothers are
keeping their babies on their shady side. We follow along in our
vehicle, keeping pace in elephant time.
Around many kinds of animals, I often feel the way I feel
around people from other cultures who live in my community. I
am not going to step into their life, and they are not going to step
into mine. Our backgrounds prevent us from being interchangeable. At the post o;ce I see people who share my time and place
yet live di=erent lives. But we understand some things about each
other. We know we are basically the same. We are moral equals.
I don’t mean to imply that I value the life of a fish or a bird
the same way I value a human life, but their presence in the
world has as much validity as does our presence. Perhaps more:
they were here first; they are foundational to us. They take only
what they need. They are compatible with the life around them.
On their watch, the world lasted. They are not the same as us
but they experience their lives vividly; they burn brightly. They
enliven the world, and beautifully.
Felicity turns to us. Resplendent, dignified. About to enter the
marsh, she’s stopped to let her child nurse. Females nursing babies need water daily. But, Vicki is explaining, “Elephants like to
top o= their calves before entering the wetland for the day, because it’s not easy to nurse if they’re up to their bellies in water.”
Consider the forethought. Premeditated, situational nursing.
So back to a question I asked earlier : does an elephant nurse her
When someone says you can’t
­attribute ­human emotions to animals,
they ­forget the key leveling detail:
humans are animals.
baby because of instinct or because of love? Is love instinctive? Or
does nursing merely satisfy some minor urge, as does scratching?
Raising young requires heavy parental investment and the
sharing of food. Parents must get some good feeling in exchange.
If a mother derived no pleasure from doing a necessary task that
was di;cult or involved delaying gratifications like eating or
drinking, what would motivate her to take care of her baby?
In When Elephants Weep, Je=rey Moussaie= Masson and Susan
McCarthy wrote that when wondering whether a mother ape loves
her baby, we might equally wonder whether it is possible to know
if the people down the street love their baby. “They may say they
love their baby, but how do we know they are telling the truth?
Ultimately we cannot know exactly what other people mean when
they speak of love.”
An ape who feeds and cradles, tickles and defends her baby,
or the mother brown bear I saw run with her triplets from the
sight of a potentially dangerous male a mile away, is certainly acting out of instinct. Certainly, right? And is a new human mother,
presented with her new baby, not feeling “instinctual” surges
and urges? Of course she is. We all do.
When we feel love for our own babies, it’s instinctive, not intellectual. Situations produce hormones, and hormones produce
feelings. It might be as automatic as the letdown of milk — but
we feel it as love. Love is a feeling. It motivates behaviors such as
feeding and protection. There is no shame in that, no shame in
reveling in the glory of love that springs from deep and ancient
wells within our cells. Indeed, it is best not to intellectualize too
thoroughly about the lovability of a newborn. Better just to cherish. The override of instinct over intellect has conceived many a
baby in the first place.
In one sense, love is a name for a feeling that evolution uses
to trick us into performing risky, costly behaviors such as child
rearing and the defense of our mates and children. A purely rational calculation of our own welfare would make us avoid such
risk and expense. Love helps commit us to them. The capacity
for love evolved because emotional bonding and parental care
increase reproduction. That doesn’t mean love is not profound.
It only means that love grows from a deep tangle of roots. And as
you know, it can feel that way.
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If an animal comes to lick you and lie next to you, you assume
it “loves ” you. And I think that’s a pretty reasonable conclusion,
especially considering the enormous range of emotions that we
label with the word love. Romantic love, parental love, infantile
love, love of community, of country, love of food, of chocolate, love
of books and education, of sports, the arts . . . The word love is
a catchall phrase for so many di=erent positive emotions. Emotions that motivate us to erase a distance, to protect, to care for
things, to participate, to stay; it’s hard to know what humans won’t
reference with the word love. We say we love ice cream, a certain
movie, practical boats and impractical shoes, or a summer day.
Some people love fighting. If we allow ourselves to be so sloppy
with such a seemingly crucial word, then one conclusion is almost inescapable: animals love. The more interesting question is:
which animals, what do they love, and in what way? How do they
experience it — what positive, gap-closing emotions do they feel?
Felicity’s baby disengages, with milk dribbling from its chin,
and ambles floppily around, smacking its lips. Life is good near
mommy’s nipples. But several slightly older youngsters, near
weaning, trumpet peals of protest as their milk-depleted mothers
deny them their accustomed chance to suck before moving into
the water. Sometimes when blocked from nursing, a young el­
ephant throws terrible tantrums. Vicki’s seen it more than once.
“They scream, like, ‘What do you mean I can’t have any
more!’” Vicki saw one near-weaning baby trying again and again
to suckle from a mother who wanted a break. All a mother has
to do is move her foreleg back to block the baby’s access to the
breast, and she kept doing that. “He got so upset, pushing her,
poking her, and tusking her, and finally it was like, ‘Ooh, I hate
you!’ — and he stuck his trunk into her anus. I guess he thought
that would really get her attention. And then he turned around
and kicked her. And I thought, ‘You little horror!’”
One day, Katito saw an elephant walking with a spear stuck
in her. She went for help. Returning with a veterinarian who’d
come to administer a dart filled with antibiotics and painkillers,
they saw that another elephant was with the wounded one — and
that the wounded one no longer had the spear in her. No one
had ever heard of an elephant removing a spear from another
elephant; it must have fallen out. But when the veterinarian’s
dart hit the wounded elephant, the friend moved in and pulled
out the dart. Researchers once saw an elephant pluck up some
food and place it into the mouth of another whose trunk was
badly injured. “Elephants show empathy,” Amboseli researchers
Richard Byrne and Lucy Bates state plainly. This should come as
no surprise. They aid the ailing. They help one another.
More mysteriously, elephants sometimes help people. George
Adamson, who helped raise the famous lion Elsa of the book
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Love is a feeling. There is no shame
in that, no shame in reveling in the
glory of love that springs from deep
and a
­ ncient wells within our cells.
Born Free, knew an elderly, half-blind Turkana woman who’d wandered o= a path; nightfall caused her to lay down under a tree.
She woke in the middle of the night to see an elephant towering
over her, sni;ng up and down with its trunk. She was paralyzed
by fear. Other elephants gathered, and they soon began breaking
branches and covering her. The next morning, her faint cries attracted a herder, who released her from the cage of branches. Had
the elephants mistaken her for dead and attempted to bury her?
That would have been strange enough. Had they sensed her helplessness and, in empathy and perhaps even compassion, enclosed
her in protection from hyenas and leopards? That would have
been stranger still.
Cynthia says that elephants’ response to death is “probably the
single strangest thing about them.” In Coming of Age with Elephants,
Joyce Poole writes, “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The
only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they
investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have
stopped singing.” Vicki has seen it herself; she says it is “heart-­
stoppingly sad.” The elephants cautiously extend their trunks,
touching the body gently, as if obtaining information. They run
their trunk tips along the lower jaw and the tusks and the teeth: the
parts that would have been most familiar in life and most touched
during greetings — the most individually recognizable parts.
Cynthia told me of a wonderful matriarch named Big Tuskless. She died of natural causes, and a few weeks later Cynthia
brought her jawbone to the research camp to determine her
age at death. A few days after that, her family passed through
the camp. There are several dozen elephant jaws on the ground
in the camp, but the family detoured right to hers. They spent
some time with it. They all touched it. And then all moved on,
except one. After the others left, one stayed a long time, stroking
Big Tuskless’s jaw with his trunk, fondling it, turning it. He was
Butch, Big Tuskless’s seven-year-old son.
Do elephants grieve? And can we really know? After a young elephant dies, its mother sometimes acts depressed for many days,
slowly trailing far behind her family. When a female named Tonie
gave birth to a stillborn baby, she stayed with her dead child for four
days, alone in the heat, guarding it from the lions who wanted it.
Grief isn’t solely about life or death; it’s mostly about loss of
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companionship. Sometimes people we know die but we don’t
grieve. Sometimes people we love decide to walk out of our lives,
and though they remain alive, we grieve. We simply terribly
miss them. Knowing them changed our lives, and losing them
changes our lives. Barbara J. King says that when two or more
animals have shared a life, “Grief results from love lost.”
Is love really the right word? If an elephant sees her sister and
calls to maintain contact, or a parrot sees its mate and wants to
be nearer, some feeling of the bond makes it seek closeness. One
word we use for the feeling behind our desire for closeness is love.
Elephants and birds don’t feel their love for one another the way I
feel my love, but the same is true of my own friends, my mother,
my wife, my stepdaughter, and my next-door neighbors. Love isn’t
one thing, and human love isn’t all identical in quality or intensity.
But I believe that the word that labels ours also labels theirs. Love,
as they say, is many splendored. Love probably is the right word.
In camp this morning, a new report is circulating, telling
us that in the last ten years, poachers have killed one hundred
thousand African elephants. That in the last ten years, central
Africa has lost about 65 percent of its elephants, and they are
everywhere dwindling.
The numbers numb me. The disparity between that cruelty
and these kind and kindred creatures with whom I have fallen
in love shatters my ability to think. It’s an irrational number, impossible to reconcile with the world my mind inhabits.
Katito confirms that the downward spiral radiates to here. “In
the early days we had many big bulls with big, big ivory. Now,
they are less. It does not compare.”
Ivory, the darkest white thing. Killing is again up sharply all
over Africa, back to where it was before the ivory ban of the early
1990s. Katito’s opinion, which many share, is that it’s going to
be tough for elephants.
Since Roman times, humans have reduced Africa’s elephant
population by perhaps 99 percent. African Elephants are gone
from 90 percent of the lands they roamed as recently as 1800,
when, despite earlier losses, an estimated 26 million elephants
still trod the continent. Now they number perhaps four hundred
thousand. (The diminishment of Asian elephants over historic
times is far worse.) The planet’s menagerie has become like shards
of broken glass; we’re grinding the shards smaller and smaller.
The very word ivory distances and obscures its elephant
source; ivory is a material and a color, like jade or gold. The word
accomplishes a linguistic dissociation not achieved by “rhino
horn,” “tiger bone,” or “shark fin.” It’s not called “elephant
tooth.” Perhaps that is why ivory must be explained.
Ivory is about poverty, ethnic rivalry, terrorism, and civil war.
Orchestrating much of this are vicious people — criminals, cor-
rupt government o;cials, o;cial governments — who are mining elephant populations to finance savage conflict. And as with
“blood diamonds,” elephant blood lubricates human blood. Blood
ivory has been helping finance Joseph Kony’s Lords Resistance
Army, Sudan’s murderous Janjaweed, and possibly al-Qaeda’s alShabab wing. Fueling all this is simple consumer craving for carvings that people could — quite literally — live without. So ivory is
not just about elephants. It would be far simpler if it were.
Of course, ivory is also about elephants. Elephants that are
intelligent and sensitive and social and live with their families
and need their mothers. From an estimated 10 million elephants
in the early 1900s to 400,000 or so and counting, today Africa’s
elephant population is about 100 fewer than yesterday’s. During the ivory crisis of the 1980s, Cynthia Moss estimated that
80,000 elephants were going into the ivory grinder annually.
Because this park’s borders are porous, elephants can simply walk in and out. Amboseli elephants leave. Kilimanjaro elephants arrive. They all wander into Tanzania and back. Tsavo
males come over. Tsavo is designated a national park, but it’s no
picnic. Poachers kill elephants, rangers kill poachers, poachers
kill rangers. Because patrols are improving and gunshots reveal
location, poachers have gone back to using poisoned arrows. In
2014, after two poisoned arrow attacks three months apart on the
largest living elephant in Kenya, a male named Satao, they got
his two-hundred-pound tusks. Like an assassination.
Many of these elephants must be thoroughly terrorized. A recent study shows that after losing a mature and knowledgeable
leader, the surviving elephants have elevated stress hormone levels for at least fifteen years, and give birth to fewer babies. After
spending thirty years working with elephants in central Africa, biologist Richard Ruggiero said, “This is an animal that is somehow
aware that something terrible is happening to it, a very sentient
creature who really knows that there’s a genocide going on.”
“They know they’re safer here,” Vicki says. “If anything bad
happens outside the park, they rush back into the park.”
The ones that haven’t fallen, she means.
fed pool. Maybe the reason is: they’re having too much fun.
They submerge like hippos and spout like whales; they roll
and splash and plow underwater with only their rumps showing.
They periscope their trunks, snorkeling the air, moving along
like black submarines.
After a while they move single file to a farther bank and
emerge shiny and wet like autos from a carwash. But one has not
yet even gone in. She remains on the bank with her baby. Her
baby is hesitant. The mother is patient. She is touching the water
with her trunk but is waiting. Eventually the mother enters. The
baby follows. The baby gets alongside her mother and wraps her
trunk around her mother’s tusk for support. Soon the water floats
the baby, and the mother, with her trunk, guides her child along.
Ultimately, the precise why and wherefore of elephant’s feelings remain in the realm of mystery. We may not know exactly
what elephants are feeling, but they do. Or perhaps they don’t.
Perhaps elephants, too, are searching for some deeper comprehension of life and death that eludes them, as it does us. Perhaps
we are not alone in bursting the confines of reason and logic
with a large enough mind to ponder imponderables. Perhaps
like us, they simply wonder. If so, there must be others who
wonder, too. a
Later in the day we encounter a large herd of elephants
commuting up out of the swamp for the night, marching across
plains lit by slanted gold sunlight. As we sense and can plainly
see, their major self-governing principle is simply, “Live and let
live.” The elephants’ way is humbler than ours. The elephants
are like poor people, like tribal people. They demand less of the
world. They take less from the world. They live in better resonance with the rest of their world.
While hundreds of other elephants plod across the dusty
plains toward distant hills, one family, for whatever reason, is
still blowing water and rolling in a deep, lushly vegetated spring-
through seed hulls
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www.orionmagazine.org/gift.
scratch
she’d been
northern junco
out
rustling among dry leaves
in the front
raking
sorting
her buttons
because it was
what
spring
a nice
day
required
of
her species
— Jody Gladding
may
|
june 2015
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